Why does champagne make you drunk faster

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The results of the study, published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine , appeared to confirm that sparkling alcoholic drinks really do make people drunk faster. On average, bubbly vodka spiked blood-alcohol concentrations faster than did the neat and the watered-down vodka. Interestingly, both the bubbly and watered-down vodkas spiked blood-alcohol concentrations faster than the neat vodka, according to that same study.

It's a phenomenon well-supported by other research. Stronger drinks seem to slow down alcohol's absorption into the bloodstream. But very few other studies to support this finding. The only other experiment to explore this question, published in in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism included only 12 participants.

Instead of comparing each participant's response to a still versus carbonated alcoholic drink, they sorted the participants into two groups: still wine drinkers and sparkling wine drinkers.

The scientists did find that participants drinking sparkling wine absorbed more alcohol; but with so few in each group, the difference could have been due to natural variation in alcohol tolerance. Let's say that champagne does make us drunk faster. How would that work? It all comes down to how quickly alcohol moves through the digestive tract. In , scientists showed that drinking vodka mixed with something carbonated spikes your blood alcohol content to a higher level than just vodka.

They attributed the spike to the presence of the bubbles. That means that when you down a glass of bubbly, you're going to get drunker way faster than you would with any flat beverage. This means a few things for your drinking experience. For one, unlike the slow onset of a shot of liquor, you're going to feel the spike quickly and intensely. On the flip side, as you come down, champagne will make you feel the sedative effect quicker as your BAC decreases.